


Surfing the Rails

by Fictionwriter



Series: The Train [1]
Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-25
Updated: 2017-04-25
Packaged: 2018-10-23 18:03:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10724424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fictionwriter/pseuds/Fictionwriter
Summary: The train keeps rollin’





	Surfing the Rails

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the original 'The Train' series of prompts on LJ

This train makes no noise but the slowed vibrations rumbling up through his body signal that it’s coming to a stop. He watches the conductor lean down from the boxcar and stretch out his arm to help the old woman climb aboard. It’s Crooked Cassie. She’s the last for tonight and when the train pulls out again there will be no more stops until it all starts over again in the new light of day.

He knows all the passengers by now, hears the whispers about Cassie, like he does about them all. The whispers that travel around the engine and through the boxcars to swirl up to his high perch before floating off into the black nothingness that surrounds them. They say Cassie was a looker in her day, a woman of the night. He wasn’t sure what that meant at first but he knows now. Before that the passenger was Earl who always gets off at the feed mill and spends the day loading pickup trucks with straw and birdseed, to atone for some past misdeed the whispers say, but no one seems to know what that misdeed was. Perhaps Earl was a thief, he ponders. Or maybe a murderer. That seems bad enough to warrant hard labour.

He wonders, sometimes, what the whispers say about him.

He’s never left the train to walk on the ground like the others do. Maybe he should. He knows he can jump off anytime, the wheels won’t take him, not this time. Find a spray can and paint the old walls of the station with swirls and symbols, show the world his tag. Or hotwire a car, maybe one of those pickups that belong to Earl’s friends, and go for a joyride. He knows the train will come back for him when he’s finished playing, it always will.

Cassie is aboard now and the train starts to move again, slowly so that she can find her place in the boxcar. Excitement builds in his belly, just like when he was a kid and his dad, his real dad, took him to the fair so they could ride the rollercoaster; his pure unadulterated joy at the sensation of weightless flight as the coaster plunged and swerved, dipped and turned making him shriek out his pleasure.

The anticipation grips him the same way as the train gathers speed. The conductor knows what he likes, what he wants and the speed increases until the cold dark night around him is a blur through the wind-whipped tears in his eyes. Travis gets to his feet, the movement easy in this otherworld he now occupies. There is no slip or slide to send him plunging over the edge, just sure-footed certainty. The roof is his kingdom, his home and he stretches out his arms to embrace the wind, and flies.


End file.
